Biography

Jacob Sloan is an active member of the Howard University Non-Tenure Track Faculty Union and a PhD candidate at SUNY Buffalo (ABD). His research takes a comparative approach to the global proletarian novel and focuses on the vital relationship between literary realism, totalization, and humanist Marxism. Tracking proletarian realist representations of capitalist unevenness and class struggle in novels from the United States, Korea, South Africa, Palestine, Senegal, and China, his dissertation argues for the importance of proletarian realism as both a narrative and theoretical intervention that pushes marxism beyond stagist and mechanistic conceptions of historical motion. A recent essay, “Country and City in the Proletarian Realist Novel: Kang Kyŏng-ae’s From Wŏnso Pond and Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy,” was published in Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. 

Other research interests include 19th- and 20th-century African American literature (especially the works of Harriet Wilson, Frances Harper, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry); marxist feminism and social reproduction theory; and resistance writing more broadly. Before coming to Howard, Jacob taught literature and writing classes for five years at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.